A quote from one of our parents: “My son always comes home after being at the Learning Centre so upbeat and confident… he was so eager to show me that he learned to handwrite ‘dad’ – he couldn’t do that before.”

At our Learning Centre, we provide specialized after-school remedial tutoring for intelligent children with low or no literacy, numeracy and/or social skills. And at our Centre we celebrate the small things – like an 8 year old boy being able to print ‘dad’ or 7 year old Kaya finally being able to say her own name because she’s learned how to pronounce the letter ‘k’.

Most people are unaware of why kids with learning problems need after-school tutoring outside of the regular public school system. Think about this, if you are a principal of a school and have a child enrolled who presents with a behaviour problem you will receive an additional $8000 per child/year from the Ministry of Education – this money is to be used to provide extra supports/services that enable the child to succeed academically. If you have a child with autism you receive $16,000. If you have a child with a learning disability you receive $0. So this means that if you are a parent of a child who is, let’s say, in grade 3 and can’t read, your only alternative is to find help for him outside the public school system. And that’s why there’s such a demand for our services.

Okay, so what happens if we don’t help kids with learning disabilities? Large percentages develop mental health issues such as anxiety disorders (it breaks my heart when I hear a child at our Centre is on anxiety medication – they’re just babies) due to lack of supports for their disability – many end up in jail. Here are some examples of what happens when we don’t help:

• 75% of children with reading disabilities in grade 3 who did not receive early intervention, continue to have difficulties learning to read throughout high school and their adult life.
• Research shows that up to 70% of young offenders have experienced learning problems. In the past 20 years, the link between learning disabilities and delinquent behaviour has been examined and confirmed in both Canada and the US;
• Almost 50% of adolescent suicides had previously been diagnosed as having learning disabilities – many of these young lives could have been saved.

Our first-year ambition with the help of SVP is this:

1. Develop a strategy that will look at a number of vehicles or workshops that can be created and implemented to help ensure that our organization becomes more financially self‐sufficient and has revenue streams that increase year over year;
2. Social Enterprise Transition Strategy – create a three‐year plan (2008‐2010) that would outline clear and manageable milestones for our organization to follow;
3. Review and demonstrate the value of the workshops as innovative means to help meet community needs that bring about desirable social change;
4. Increase accessibility to workshops by providing them on our website (podcast?);
5. Marketing/communications plans for the workshops;
6. Apply earned revenue from the workshops towards increasing agency capacity.
   

http://www.ldav.ca/